8 jun. 2011

Bullshit Fields (13)

For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

In other words, the Texas Marksman's Fallacy.

There is an even more startling finding in one of the books reviewed here (Kirsch). Patients in a double-blind placebo study knew they were getting the real drug, and not a placebo, because of the side-effects. When given another drug with side effects, as a placebo, the difference in effectiveness between the real drug and the placebo disappeared! Unbe-fucking-lievable.

According to another author, Whitaker, reviewed here,

the natural history of mental illness has changed. Whereas conditions such as schizophrenia and depression were once mainly self-limited or episodic, with each episode usually lasting no more than six months and interspersed with long periods of normalcy, the conditions are now chronic and lifelong. Whitaker believes that this might be because drugs, even those that relieve symptoms in the short term, cause long-term mental harms that continue after the underlying illness would have naturally resolved.

5 comentarios:

Well my haircutter has gotten on SSRIs and claims they help massively. Or could it be the new apartment, the therapist, the bicycle, and the new work situation? The way these things are marketed really reminds me of faith healing.

I am also inclined to believe the point on episodic vs. chronic and lifelong. But you have to realize, again, how heavily marketed those ideas have been.

I suppose, yes. I was thinking of those MSWs and BCSWs who are making big bucks as therapists with even less training and any kind than a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist. But maybe that's not even a topic on research fields but on quackery in general.

Here's another useful book for and against psychoanalysis, from Routledge. I am getting quite in the review essay I could research and write on these volumes. I always feel guilty about not reading novels for recreation and about reading academic books in other fields, but I suppose the latter could be redefined as my official recreational reading. http://www.amazon.com/Against-Psychoanalysis-Stephen-Frosh/dp/1583917799/ref=sr_1_34?ie=UTF8&qid=1307650650&sr=8-34

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."